National Law Journal, Law Schools Helping to Pay the Price for Students’ Firm Employment:
In May, SMU unveiled its Test Drive program, in which the school pays employers $3,500 to take in recent graduates for one or two months. Advocates said the program is an innovative way to help graduates get a foot in the employment door amid an exceptionally tight job market. Skeptics dismissed it as an attempt to game the U.S. News & World Report‘s law school rankings by inflating job-placement data.
With the first cycle of Test Drive nearly complete, SMU administrators say the program has been a rousing success, with 48 recent graduates going through the program — about 20% of the class of 2010. Of those graduates, 35 received offers for permanent jobs from their host employer. Another six are still in their trial phase and three are in longer-term trial periods that grew out of the initial Test Drive. The remainder either declined to complete the program or did not receive permanent offers. …
SMU isn’t the only law school that has seen success with incentivized jobs programs. Career services administrators at Duke Law School are similarly pleased with the results of its three-year-old Bridge to Practice program, which pays unemployed recent graduates a modest stipend during eight-week fellowships with legal employers. The focus of Bridge to Practice is slightly different from that of Test Drive. Host employers aren’t necessarily expected to hire fellows permanently. Rather, the goal is for graduates to parlay their experience and networking opportunities into a permanent job.
“The idea is that they will leverage the experience into permanent employment,” said Bruce Elvin, an associate dean at the school and the director of the Career and Professional Development Center. “Sometimes the employer will say, ‘We could use this person full-time,’ but that isn’t the expectation.”
Bridge to Practice has produced the desired results. Of the 30 students from the class of 2010 who have participated thus far, those who don’t yet have a permanent job are in the “single digits,” Elvin said.
Although public interest fellowships aren’t a new phenomenon at law schools, SMU and Duke’s programs are different because graduates can take private-sector jobs as well as nonprofit or government work. Additionally, neither school caps the number of graduates who may participate as most public interest fellowship programs do.
But not everyone believes that subsidizing salaries for private employers is the best use of law school funds. The University of Miami School of Law never considered including private employers in its new Legal Corps program, in which the school pays $2,500 a month to recent graduates who accept public interest law jobs for six months.
“Well-heeled law firms don’t need us to pay their associates,” said law Dean Patricia White. “They don’t need our students as volunteers. Legal Corps is our effort to address both the lack of jobs for new graduates and fill the gap of need at public interest law organizations.”
Though Legal Corps just started in January, it has already placed 41 students at employers as diverse as the public defenders’ office in American Samoa and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in Washington. White anticipates that some graduates will be hired by their host organizations, but many others will use what they’ve learned during the six-month program to start their own practices. …
Test Drive and Bridge to Practice have at least one significant drawback: They are expensive for the law schools to maintain. Elvin declined to disclose the amount of the monthly stipend Bridge to Practice participants earn, though he said it’s based on the hourly wage of the school’s research assistants. Duke is funding the program through a combination of alumni donations and law school money.
SMU’s costs have been “very significant,” Attanasio said. Test Drive participants may apply for a second month of the $3,500 stipend if their host employer indicates it is looking toward hiring them permanently. The majority of the 2010 participants exercised the option to extend the program. That means the school likely spent more than $300,000 on stipends, although Attanasio declined to reveal the total cost. On top of that, the school is funding its new Partners to Practice program, which seeks to create more summer-associate opportunities for SMU students by matching summer-associate pay, which in turn makes it cheaper for employers to bring on summer clerks. Money to fund both programs has come directly out of the law school’s budget, Attanasio said.
Both Elvin and Attanasio said their respective programs are intended to help graduates secure jobs — not to boost their U.S. News ranking. Bridge to Practice has helped Duke report a 100 percent employment rate after nine months of graduation for the classes of 2008 and 2009. But that perfect record raised some eyebrows among legal educators.
“No other school — not even Harvard or Yale — managed this,” wrote Indiana University School of Law – Indianapolis professor Gerard Magliocca on the law blog Concurring Opinions. “And to have that result as the stock market was imploding is even more amazing.”
SMU has committed to offer Test Drive to the class of 2011, but the school plans to drop the program after that if the job market improves. “We don’t view this as a permanent program,” Attanasio said. “We’re concerned that when it gets to be good times again, this will become sort of a crutch.”
Conversely, Bridge to Practice is here to stay at Duke, Elvin said. The program was conceived prior to the 2008 financial crisis and has never been viewed by the law school administration as a stopgap. Elvin said he has fielded calls from about 20 law schools in the past year seeking more information about the program.
